When ANZ Bank New Zealand filed its appeal of Justice Geoffrey Venning’s 4 May 2026 summary judgment, it opened the next chapter of a legal saga that has tested not just the limits of consumer finance law, but the boundaries of what banks can do when the law doesn’t suit them, including trying to change it.
It is also followed by the most recent move of a senior jurist to the independent bar, another Bench-to-Bar move that is becoming increasingly common.
The story of Simons v ANZ is, at its core, a story about access to justice. It is a class action victory that arguably would never have been possible without the strategic deployment of litigation funding to level the playing field between individual borrowers and one of the country’s largest financial institutions.
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